Nothing Secret About Character Agency: Write@YA Episode 20

Characters without agency always feel a little off. You wonder why they’re not engaging, why the story is moving without them. Why they spend so much time reacting instead of acting. It’ s a pit most authors fall into at one point or another, even if we scrub the problem clean before publication.

Most of the time, anyway.

Good stories require character agency like plants require sunlight. You may not notice right away when it’s missing, but after long enough you’ll see the whole thing wilting. And we don’t want our stories to wilt, do we?